Posts on Integrated Marketing

Personas are the foundation of all great higher education marketing plans because they epitomize your potential students and help guide how you talk to them. When you can put a name and story to a specific audience like, say, military students, you can better predict their wants, needs, and educational journeys—and when your messaging is that tailored, they’ll appreciate what you have to say. To start developing the perfect personas for your institution’s marketing strategy, consider these tips.

During a recent client campus visit, I had the opportunity to meet with the College’s advancement team. Just weeks before going public with their largest ever comprehensive campaign, the team was lamenting the untimely realization that the bulk of the College’s communications with its alumni were almost singularly focused on soliciting donations. Their concern, of course—an absolutely valid one—was that their alumni had grown fatigued, and maybe even disenchanted with their alma mater, feeling that all the College really cares about is the next donation.

Faced with growing competition and a shrinking pool of applicants, it’s important, now more than ever, for institutions to optimize every opportunity to convert prospective students into qualified leads. Let’s assume you’ve already allocated a portion of your budget to an enrollment marketing campaign. Whether your approach includes media, email marketing, SEO, or other traffic drivers, the next step is to evaluate your landing pages. Here are five tips to ensure you’re driving traffic to high-converting pages (and getting the information you need from prospective students).

Want to know how your institution’s recruitment emails stack up against others in your field? According to Silverpop‘s latest email marketing metrics benchmark study, the mean unique open rate in the education space clocks in at around 25 percent. If you’re not satisfied with the number of opens you’re seeing in comparison to that average—or if you just want to do better—there are a lot of tried-and-true tactics you can implement to improve those results. Here are a few.